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Cid Corman, b. 1924, was born in Boston, and received his B.A. from Tufts.
He did graduate work at the University of Michigan, where he won the
Hopwood Award for Poetry, and the University of North Carolina. Throughout
the 1950's and 1960's Corman's magazine ORIGIN published some of the major
works of the Black Mountain poets, as well as other important work,
choosing mostly poems not yet readily available elsewhere: the early
poetry
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"A hint or tint of
music - as if the silence
were being turned on."
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of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov with the late works
of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. He carried on a
fascinating
correspondence with Stevens, who greatly respected what Origin was doing.
Corman has published over seventy volumes of poetry, translated several
French and Japanese poets, and published four volumes of essays. He has
lived in Kyoto, Japan since 1958 where he and his wife run a business, Cid
Corman's Dessert Shop. Corman is one of "late" modernism's most
significant
enablers, a poet of talent himself, and a master of "production" -- whose
work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists
Zukofsky and Oppen, as well as Creeley and Olson. Among those poetic
colleagues and many younger poets worldwide, Corman's verse is perhaps the
most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation of "effect" for the
tactile ink of line and "touch." His collection Nothing Doing is full of
poetry of cognitive conundrum, but also of uncompromising wisdom, where
Corman can definitively declare: "There's only / one poem: / this is it."
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Cid Corman in 1995 (courtesy Fran Ryan)
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Corman was one of the first to theorize what modernist verse can do on the
radio. In Poetry (1952) he wrote a piece on poetry and radio that reads,
in
part: "What few poets seem to realize is that radio is their best
potential
outlet these days. It puts the stress rightly on the spoken word, tests
the
imagination of writer and listener spoken revives the need of the
oral-aural commitment in verse, and permits the largest possible audience
to experience the poem. As a rare diet, of course, it undermines itself.
But there is no reason today, under sincere and determined effort, that
good poetry programs should not be available throughout the country. They
con be noncommercial sustaining programs, like This Is Poetry. Nearly
three
years ago I initiated my weekly broadcasts, known as This Is Poetry, from
WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston. The program has been usually a fifteen-minute
reading of modern verse on Saturday evenings at seventhirty; however, I
have taken some liberties and have read from Moby Dick and from stories by
Dylan Thomas, Robert Creeley, and Joyce. In the approximately 150 programs
to date, during which I have had the opportunity to improve my delivery
and
to appreciate oral detail, I have offered the program to many guest poets,
to read and discuss their work. About a third of the programs have been of
this kind. My guests have included such writers as John Crowe Ransom,
Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Spender, John Ciardi, Theodore Roethke, Pierre
Emmanuel, Allan Curnow, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberbart, Katherine
Hoskins, and Vincent Ferrini. A number of the programs have been
bilingual,
in English and French, Spanish, German, or Italian. I have had young but
highly qualified persons, native to the tongues, read the originals
against
my reading of translations. Programs have been given to Corbiere, Eluard,
Lorca, Ungaretti, Benn, and others. Imagine hearing Claudio Guillen, son
of
Jorge Guillen, read a poem that Lorca wrote for him when he was a child in
Spain...."
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